George Bush’s visit to Australia last week provided a first-hand lesson in the difficulties progressive activists face in getting their message through biased commercial media.

On the morning of Bush’s arrival in Australia’s capital, Canberra, about 1,500 people gathered in front of Parliament House for a largely peaceful protest against US foreign policy. The protesters were clearly drawn from all sections of society. Many had dragged themselves from bed, bleary-eyed after struggling to sleep as over-the-top security measures saw loud jet fighters circling above Canberra rooftops all night. (More info on this take-over of Canberra by Bush).

After various speakers addressed the crowd, including the Leader of the Greens party, Senator Bob Brown, the protesters marched to Prime Minister John Howard’s official residence, The Lodge, where Howard was due to host a barbeque for Bush after his speech to Parliament.

On the way, the protest stopped at the US Embassy, where scuffles broke out between police and a handful of protestors.

From start to finish, the whole protest took more than five hours. Things got rough with the police for about twenty minutes. Of the 1,500 protesters (some estimates put the number at over 2000), about twenty or so might have been involved in tussles with the police. Five were reportedly arrested.

Later that night, on the Nine Network news (by far the most watched Australian national TV news service and owned by media mogul Kerry Packer), a forty-second news item covered the protest. The entire forty seconds was taken up with footage of violence.

In what amounted to a gross misrepresentation of the protest through omission, there was no footage of the speakers at the beginning of the protest. There was no footage of the peaceful marching and chanting. No interviews with protesters. Certainly no footage of the kids marching in their school uniforms. And of course no footage of the mums and dads marching with their babies in strollers.

The footage falsely portrayed the protest as a running battle that had lasted all morning. The piece ended with snide remark by the reporter, Karl Stefanovic, which implied the protesters were wasting their time because Bush’s vehicles had avoided the protest by entering The Lodge through a back entrance.

Incensed after watching the report, I telephoned Stefanovic to ask why he misrepresented the protest to millions of Australians.

His answer? The footage of the violence was the “most graphic” he had.

Rarely in the commercial media would you find a more candid admission of shameless dumbing-down and sensationalisation.

Nor could you find a more candid admission of bias. During our exchange, Stefanovic said that he and his crew had been present for the entire protest but admitted he had edited the item to show only the violence because the protesters “were fucking in the wrong”.

Unprovoked violence against police at protests is wrong and Stefanovic was right to report it. But he was wrong – totally wrong – to show only the violence. When reporters editorialise through shameless omission at the expense of showing a full and impartial representation of events, viewers get a distorted view of their institutions, their politics and their fellow citizens.

Unfortunately we’ve come to expect such shallow reportage from commercial networks in Australia. In this case, the predictable stereotype of the violent longhaired ratbag was dragged out again for the punters in suburban TV Land.

Commercial news organisations don’t realise that, despite their efforts, this stereotype is losing traction. The vast protests, both here and overseas, prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq by the US, Britain and Australia, bear that out. The protests were full of folk who previously would not have turned up to any type of protest at all. Last week’s protest was full of them also. Not that you’d know it if you watched the Nine Network.

The presence of this new variety of protester is further evidence that green politics and peace politics have re-emerged from the longhaired fringe. The Greens party in Australia has more than tripled its membership in just over two years. They’ve doubled their primary vote to more than eight per cent nationally. With only eight parliamentary seats protecting the incumbent right-wing coalition from defeat, both major parties will be courting the Greens for preference deals ahead of the federal election next year. (See this for a surprisingly balanced look at the growing influence of the Australian Greens and its leader, Bob Brown).

These figures are set to increase as the Greens leadership continue to get more airtime. While protestors outside Parliament were filmed last week by biased commercial media reporters, inside a far more effective protest was taking place. Greens leader Bob Brown was interrupting George Bush’s speech, demanding that the two Australians held illegally by the US in Guantanemo Bay be returned to Australia.

Brown was immediately banned from Parliament for 24 hours, but his protest was widely reported. (Ironically, an American news crew, breaking Australian law when filming the action inside Parliament, took the only footage of this protest. ABC’s Media Watch reported this incident on October 27) Brown went onto field interviews ad-nauseam all day and his protest continues to be debated in the media this week.

Later that night at the VIP lounge at Canberra airport, fellow parliamentarians reportedly shunned Brown for interrupting Bush. But as he walked through a public gate lounge after touching down in Melbourne, a large crowd spontaneously applauded him.

The mild-mannered man in the suit had stared down the most powerful warmonger in the world, and won the day. What a pity the mild-mannered folk outside the Parliament weren’t shown trying to do the same.

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Mark Jeanes is an occasional freelance writer based in Melbourne. He is a member of the Australian Greens party.

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